In the Denver Area, a Battle of the Car vs. the Train

By JAMES BROOKE

Published: November 3, 1997

DENVER, Nov. 2—
Conjuring up the dreaded specter of Los Angeles, environmentalists and business leaders here are joining hands to urge voters to approve on Tuesday a $16 billion plan to graft a hub-and-spoke light rail system onto Denver's booming metropolitan area.

''Light rail will help us from becoming another L.A.,'' said Lauren Martens, an environmentalist who worked for the coalition, Transit '97. ''We face the danger of choking in smog and traffic congestion, of destroying our open spaces and communities with sprawl.''

Denver's light rail plan, one of the most ambitious in the nation, reflects the West's sharpening love-hate relationship with mass transit. In the last year, voters in Phoenix rejected a light rail plan, and voters in Portland rejected a plan to expand its light rail system. At the same time, Salt Lake City broke ground on a 15-mile, $290 million north-south line. And last month, Boise residents tried out an experimental commuter train on freight tracks in the city.

Denver already has a small light rail line with 5.3 miles of track. And next week, regardless of Tuesday's vote, bulldozers will start preparing the track bed for an 8.7-mile extension for which money is already committed.

But some in Denver want the project to stop there.

''People who don't use transit love trains,'' protested Jon Caldara, who is drumming up anti-rail votes here under the slogan, ''Don't Buy the Lie.'' ''About 98 percent of people around here have never used transit. This is the West.''

In 1980, Denver area voters rejected a plan to build a $1 billion, 73-mile light rail line. In a poll last week, surveyed voters narrowly favored the $16 billion plan, which calls for 93 miles of rail lines and car-pool lanes.

The difference in attitudes is the tale of Denver's growth.

Since 1980, greater Denver's population has increased by 50 percent, to 2.1 million, but the number of miles traveled on roads has increased almost twice as much.

Nationwide, according to a Federal Highway Administration study of 50 metropolitan areas, the portion of urban freeways clogged during rush hours has increased from 55 percent in 1983 to almost 70 percent today. In Denver, the increase has been sharp: from 4 percent to 54 percent. During Denver's traffic jams this year, drivers will burn up about $1 billion worth of gasoline, feeding air pollution, known locally as the ''Brown Cloud.''

At Denver's notorious ''Mousetrap,'' the junction of two interstates, traffic is running at 340,000 vehicles a day, triple the level of 1964.

As traffic speeds slow and rush hours expand, road rage has reached ''epidemic proportions,'' the Colorado State Patrol says. Going after reckless weavers and high-speed tailgaters, the patrol issued 18 percent more nonspeeding tickets last year than in 1995.

Easygoing Denver is starting to see its first Los Angeles-style freeway shootings. Last week, two Denver area men were charged with murder in the shooting of a driver on Interstate 25, the state's busiest highway. In a separate incident 10 days ago, a Denver area man was arrested after he pointed a gun at another car driving down Interstate 70, the state's other major highway.

With one million new residents expected to join greater Denver's population over the next 25 years, it would seem easy to win enough votes to raise the region's transit tax by two-thirds, to one penny on the dollar. Business groups have raised $550,000 for the transit campaign, outspending their opponents 12 to 1.

The light rail plan has the support of the region's most powerful politicians. On Monday, Colorado's Governor, Roy Romer, is to join Denver's Mayor, Wellington Webb, for a publicity ride on the city's electric rail line.

But a feisty, guerrilla-style campaign led by Mr. Caldara is throwing the outcome into doubt.

''We are looking to the 19th century for solutions to our 21st-century problems,'' said Mr. Caldara, who represents Boulder in the six-county Regional Transportation District. He counts among his supporters tax protesters, automobile commuters and one of the city's two daily papers.

''It will put a dent in your wallet, not in the traffic,'' he added, noting official estimates that a rail system would pull only 50,000 cars off Denver highways by 2020. Paying people to use car pools would be cheaper and would take twice as many cars off the roads, Mr. Caldara said.

Indeed, car pools are a popular transit alternative in the West. In Salt Lake City, traffic delays mounted this year with the reconstruction of Interstate 15. Car pooling increased 25 percent while bus ridership remained flat.

Rush-hour tolls, four-day workweeks, car-pool and bus lanes, and on-board computers mapping uncongested traffic routes would ease Denver's traffic woes, Mr. Caldara said. He added: ''We don't have to build new highways. We have to focus on highways during the three hours a day when they are congested.''

With two-thirds of Denver area commuters going from suburb to suburb, critics dismiss the rail plan as the Ride to Denver. They say private jitneys would provide a flexible, intersuburban service.

Light rail is slower than it sounds, Mr. Caldara added. In the campaign, he offered to race a car against Denver's light rail, which averages only 14.5 miles an hour.

Indeed, in Portland, commuters have often found that express buses are faster than the existing rail line, which makes frequent stops on its way from the city's eastern suburbs.

''People say, 'Paris and Denver have the same size populations -- why can't we have a rail system like Paris?' '' Mr. Caldara said. ''Well, the difference is that there are 2.1 million Parisians living in 40 square miles. Denver's transit district covers 2,400 square miles.'' Light rail advocates counter that the line will serve as a magnet for growth, developing riders over time as people adjust work and living patterns to the availability of reliable transit.

''This is going to have an influence on the land development patterns in the metro area,'' said Linda Morton, chairwoman of Transit '97 and Mayor of Lakewood, a suburban city. ''We would much rather have densities along these rail corridors instead of this sprawl development we seem to be having.''

With the rail plan, the portion of rush hour commuters using mass transit would increase to 21 percent in 2020 from 9 percent today, transit planners predict.

Some Denverites have already shown an ''un-Western'' tendency to forsake the steering wheel for a bus seat. In downtown Denver, the region's most important job center, one-quarter of the workers commute by bus or rail.

Photo: A ballot item in the election on Tuesday asks voters to expand Denver's light commuter train system to fight traffic and smog problems. Passengers disembarked at a transfer station at the end of currently short rail lines. (Kevin Moloney for The New York Times)